The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of information that has to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing data, so what will be removed during the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the content and the quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find various compression algorithms that are better for various kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action should have sufficient resources to be able to process the data quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the web hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work quicker. We can benefit from this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is one more benefit of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. In this way, you will always be able to bring back any content that you erase by mistake.